[zanellato19]

Since the beginning of capitalism involved owning slaves, I find that very hard to believe.

This romanticization of early stage capitalism is awful. What is late stage capitalism? Because civil rights and women rights have been pretty recent in the grand scheme of things, so in that sense Capitalism was upheld and had most of its lifetime in a scheme that crushed the majority of its people I find the theory of:

> Capitalism is pretty great in the beginning

really hard to swallow.

[__MatrixMan__]

In the early days of capitalism there was plenty of authentic scarcity for it to work against. Its problems probably weren't any less, but the juice was plausibly worth the squeeze because the alternatives were terrible.

Now, most of us are working to maintain artificial scarcities, rather than mitigate authentic ones, and there are a lot more of us. So the a randomly chosen effect of our system is more likely to be negative because it's being chosen in a context that's very far from that long lost age when capitalism seemed necessary.

I think that's what makes it late-stage, when it's found to have more side-effect than desired effect. Like a yeast which started turning sugar into alcohol at a prodigious rate but then later the alcohol concentration is toxic to it and more effort is spent trying to filter it out than anything to do with its original purpose.

[error_logic]

Capitalism is still necessary, we just forgot what it took to save capitalism from itself during the great depression and have opened ourselves up to turning into modern Russia.

[isk517]

Not a die hard defender of capitalism by any means but this is a gross over simplification. If you look at all of the alternatives during the early stages of capitalism the vast majority had oppression as a built in feature. It didn't bring about utopia but it did offer the best advantages over the competition, up until the competition all went under.

[error_logic]

If everyone has destruction of the competition as their primary goal, everyone suffers. The voting system itself incentivizes that, and now competition is going to be driven underground and emerge destructively just as it did in the USSR.

Extremes of left and right-wing politics both require excessive force to implement.

We need a voting system that will overcome the nash equilibrum of mutually assured destruction by assigning weights to the outcomes of collective responsibility for our interactions, not just "be selfish or not" on an individual level or "stay in the frying pan or put some people in the fire" politically.

[__MatrixMan__]

Can you expand on this weighting idea you have re: voting?

[isk517]

I image they are talking about something like ranked choice voting. Australia currently uses a system like it instead of first past the post. From what I've heard it doesn't really stop a 2 party system from forming, but it does keep it stable because political parties can see which way the wind is blowing. If 40% of your vote came from people that had less extreme party as their first round choice, and 10% of your votes came from people that had more extreme party as their first round choice then you get a good idea of what the majority of your voters actually care about.

[__MatrixMan__]

I'm not so sure

> assigning weights to the outcomes of collective responsibility for our interactions

Voting is an input, not an outcome. Anyhow re: ranked choice voting, it's better than FPTP like we use in the US, though if I had to pick one it would be https://www.starvoting.org

[zanellato19]

Sure, but the least awful of all awful is not great. Capitalism was the _least worse_ of the options we've seen. And even that can be debated, imo.

[photonthug]

> Since the beginning of capitalism involved owning slaves, I find that very hard to believe.

If you look into this a little bit more, I think you’ll find that the institution of slavery doesn’t strictly require any particular system of economics, government, or religion.

Anyway, you are misunderstanding what I meant by early / late capitalism.. it’s not just about specific calendar epochs like 1950-present. What I’m referring to is that any new market will have early/middle/late stages that are pretty distinct from each other. A new market might be created by new policy (say a change in import/export restrictions) or by new technology (like the internet or AI) or by new frontiers (like the East Indies before, and outer space soon). Late stage here just means the real ideation and competition is basically finished and now it’s time for consolidation, M+A, integrating vertically, optimizing exploitation/extraction, enshittification, etc.